> I'm leaning more towards stacked micro-houses, aka micro condos, as the "future of housing" in urban centers.

This is already a thing, it's called coffin cubicles or cage homes: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2017/jun/07/boxed...

What I'm trying to say is: No, you should not lean towards this. You should lean towards jobs and opportunities spreading out over the country. To appeal to the HN population, instead of thinking in the binary thought of "SF (or some other tech hub) or fully remote!", consider another option: opening up smaller offices. Bring work where housing is affordable.

The price of housing is only one factor. You can probably buy a nice, cheap house and open some office in the arse end of nowhere. And then you can spend your day driving around to get basic shopping done.

Some cities are certainly more affordable than others, but in my experience they are also much less desirable.

I've lived most of my life in places ranging from a monastery to a town with around 20k people. I never needed to spend a day driving around to get basic shopping done.

I now live in a place an order of magnitude larger, but that really does not cut down on the time spent on basic shopping.

The issue is that once a job can be done remotely or moved to a cheaper city, it can usually just be moved to a different country where the labor is much cheaper.

We will likely not see jobs move to less expensive areas in the US(or any other high wage country), in any meaningfully significant number, because those cheaper areas can never compete with cheaper countries overseas on cost.

The big issue with moving jobs to other countries more than anything else is timezones and language.

Distributed teams across the US isnt much of a problem, but try working with people that have an 8 hour timezones difference and it's much more difficult.

> No, you should not lean towards this. You should lean towards jobs and opportunities spreading out over the country.

Can someone say 'urban sprawl'?

Have you done the math for your company? No one I know wants to do that because the talent wants to be where the other talent is. Perhaps you’re targeting the niche who wants to live somewhere as your hiring pool? How has that worked out so far?

Why not? I don't see any reason why young individuals looking to experience inner city life wouldn't be happy to exchange loving space for easy commuting and urban culture (which is what they already do).

>Why not?

Because your equity is now at the mercy of other people who you cannot control. No one wants to default on a mortgage.

I think we're talking about two different things. The parent comment was referring to micro apartments, which are generally rented to tenants.

Considering that many college students have two to four dormatory roommates, I don't see what's wrong with renting a small living as a young adult - provided that the living space itself is up to code.

Ah ok, I thought it was the shared mortgage idea. I see no issue with shared housing, not exactly a radical idea.

Shared housing is one thing. Shared housing with which you share major financial responsibility with someone else is another matter. Houses also require maintenance, are often upgraded over time, etc. and reasonable people can disagree about what needs to be done when and how—especially if people have significantly different financial situations.

I feel like we're going in circles. I said the same thing and was corrected (these are rentals.) I then agree, and you come in saying they're not rentals. Which is it?

Here's my stance:

Getting into a mortgage with roommates = bad.

Getting into a lease with roommates = no problem.

I was agreeing that shared rentals are fine. Well, they can have problems too but people mostly manage. As you say shared mortgages seem very risky in general.

Yeah, I think the issues that arise with roommates are well understood and generally acceptable given the benefits. Shared mortgages are insane.

Are these not just "a block of flats" in British parlance? Buildings with 5+ floors containing a variety of single-floor homes between 300 and 1000sqft are the way most people live in British cities.

'Stacked micro-houses' are probably related to 'blocks of flats' as 'tiny houses' are to 'mobile homes' - a way of selling traditionally lower class housing to middle-class hipsters.

Micro-houses are the future of housing for everyone.

The massive living spaces we have now are not sustainable. By 2050 if we are to avoid 2 degrees of warming we need to be emitting 2 tons of carbon per year per person: http://insight.gbig.org/targeting-2-tons-closer-than-we-thin.... The average American today emits 11 tons, whereas 2 tons per person is closer to that of someone living in Brazil or Egypt.

In climates where you need to heat and cool a home, carbon taxes will make heating and cooling the living spaces we have now financially impossible. People will drive demand for these smaller living options out of necessity. Additionally, as we make consumption less and less economically attractive people will have fewer things to want to store anyway, and personal vehicles will likely no longer be something the average person will be able to afford or want so there will be less need for parking and garages.

Your 11 tons is total US emissions (including industrial), spread out across the entire population. Of course the US emits 5x that of Brazil or Egypt, the US produces 5x the output.

Moving into micro houses isn’t going to cut it, you’d need to slash US economic activity to reduce those numbers (an entire new technology).

Microhousing would be just one development carbon taxing would bring about- if we began to price our food appropriately for example animal agriculture would largely come to an end except for luxuries, and that would do a great deal to cut emissions. Personal vehicles and flying would also become cost prohibitive. These are only a few of the ways taxing carbon could make our lifestyles more sustainable and shrink highly polluting sectors of our economy such that we reach a more sustainable amount of emissions per capita.

Which is why we won't ever have those carbon taxes. As soon as politicians implement (or probably even seriously suggest) carbon taxes with enough pain to legitimately incentivize people to give up their homes (and all their stuff) to live in "microhousing", some other politician will come along and tell your constituents that you're crazy and they have a better way. And poof, just like that you're out of a job.

We're not going to solve climate change by democracies adopting high carbon taxes.

I worry that without the voting public waking up to the reality of how deep in the hole we already are we won't solve climate change at all. No near-future technology has the ability to reduce emissions by the amount we need to, besides widespread deployment of nuclear power which is also not politically viable. At some point people will, either willingly or by force (such as widespread natural disaster and famine), realize that things have to change.

I think the problem here is that you still have some hope that climate change can be reversed or at least mitigated. It can't.

There is simply no way developed nations are going to curb their emissions enough in time, and that developing nations will refrain from increasing their emissions, for us to avoid this disaster.

We might as well get used to the idea that our civilization is going to collapse before too long, and there's really nothing we can do about it. Other civilizations in the past collapsed and disappeared because of environmental change, and ours will be no different.

Well, a little different. We have globe-spanning transportation and communications. Actual technology to bring to bear. The best chance of mitigating the disaster that has ever existed in history.

Yes, but before that actual technology, there wasn't a problem because we weren't pumping so much carbon into the atmosphere. And even with technology, there's too many political problems to actually use that technology to solve the problem before it's too late, which climate scientists are telling us it already is.

Our globe-spanning communications seems like it should help us solve these problems together, but instead look what it's brought us: anti-vaxers convincing a lot of people not to vaccinate, which has now brought back diseases we thought were almost extinct. Instead of using these communications to convince people about real problems and solve them, these communications have instead enabled the stupidest people to have a much larger voice and influence, which has led us to disaster politically in the US for one (just look at who we elected in 2016).

Sorry, but I don't see how there's any way out of this mess. We can't just figure things out in 50 years and then start fixing the problem; by then it'll be far too late.

That's exactly what's going to happen. Humanity will not solve climate change until we're already suffering badly from its effects.

Which is a shame since it is the only realistic option.

That's the whole point: it's not a realistic option because it ignores political reality.

Political realities are the easiest to change in this case. See segregation.

Can't I just keep my moderately sized home and add solar panels? I would definitely rather do that and bike to the train station.

If we implemented a carbon pricing scheme and these panels allowed you to heat and cool your home with no or minimal draw off the grid, this would be an affordable option.

> But that doesn't solve the monthly mortgage cost.

The space can be rented out to someone else to cover the cost, possibly at a profit to the remaining owners since the renter isn't taking on any risk.

The bigger risk in this arrangement is to the party that is leaving since a share of a house is illiquid.